Beyond Natural Borders and Social Bordering: The Political Agency of the Lower Rio Bravo/Grande

Geopolitics ◽  
2022 ◽  
pp. 1-17
Author(s):  
Xavier Oliveras-González
Keyword(s):  
Political Agency ◽  
The Political ◽  
Rio Bravo

ROUPAS COMO CORPOS: O AGENCIAMENTO POLÍTICO DO VESTUÁRIO POR CHRISTIAN BOLTANSKI / Clothes as bodies: the political agency of clothing by Christian Boltanski

2020 ◽  
Vol 26 (39) ◽  
pp. 55-65
Author(s):  
Angélica Adverse
Keyword(s):  
Political Agency ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Regimes ◽  
Historical Document ◽  
Central Idea ◽  
Political Experience

O artigo aborda o agenciamento das roupas no trabalho do artista Christian Boltanski. Partindo da dimensão do poder dos corpos têxteis, analisaremos como as roupas investem-se das palavras emudecidas dos corpos ausentes, constituindo-se como alegoria do testemunho e do documento histórico. A ideia central é pensar como as roupas explicitam a aniquilação humana provocada pelos regimes políticos totalitários. Analisaremos como as instalações Prendre la Parole (2005) e Personnes(2010) desvelam a presença-ausência da vida-morte na experiência política do discurso têxtil.  Palavras-chave: Roupas; Corpos; Agenciamento; Política; Memória.AbstractThe article addresses the agency of clothes in the work of the artist Christian Boltanski. Starting from the dimension of the power of the textile bodies, we will analyze how the clothes invest themselves with the muted words of the absent bodies, constituting themselves as an allegory of the testimony and of the historical document. The central idea is to think about how clothes make explicit human annihilation brought about by totalitarian political regimes. We will analyze how the installations Prendre la Parole (2005) and Personnes (2010) reveal the presence-absence of life-death in the political experience of textile discourse.Keywords: Clothes; Bodies; Agency; Politics; Memory. 

scholarly journals (In)coherent subjects? The politics of conceptualising resistance in the UK asylum system

2021 ◽  
pp. 239965442110338
Author(s):  
Sarah M Hughes
Keyword(s):  
Political Action ◽  
Political Agency ◽  
The Political ◽  
Ethnographic Research ◽  
Sovereign Power ◽  
Subject Formation ◽  
Grounding Resistance ◽  
Migration Control ◽  
The Uk

Many accounts of resistance within systems of migration control pivot upon a coherent migrant subject, one that is imbued with political agency and posited as oppositional to particular forms of sovereign power. Drawing upon ethnographic research into the role of creativity within the UK asylum system, I argue that grounding resistance with a stable, coherent and agentic subject, aligns with oppositional narratives (of power vs resistance), and thereby risks negating the entangled politics of the (in)coherence of subject formation, and how this can contain the potential to disrupt, disturb or interrupt the practices and premise of the UK asylum system. I suggest that charity groups and subjects should not be written out of narratives of resistance apriori because they engage with ‘the state’: firstly, because to argue that there is a particular form that resistance should take is to place limits around what counts as the political; and secondly, because to ‘remain oppositional’ is at odds with an (in)coherent subject. I show how accounts which highlight a messy and ambiguous subjectivity, could be bought into understandings of resistance. This is important because as academics, we too participate in the delineation of the political and what counts as resistance. In predetermining what subjects, and forms of political action count as resistance we risk denying recognition to those within this system.

scholarly journals ‘Moving life stories tell us just why politics matters’: Personal narratives in tabloid anti-austerity campaigns

Journalism ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 18 (10) ◽  
pp. 1346-1363 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jen Birks
Keyword(s):  
Content Analysis ◽  
Civil Society ◽  
Qualitative Analysis ◽  
Welfare Reform ◽  
Life Stories ◽  
Personal Narratives ◽  
Political Agency ◽  
The Political ◽  
Civil Society Organisations

This article examines the use of personal narratives in two tabloid newspaper campaigns against a controversial welfare reform popularly known as the ‘bedroom tax’. It aims first to evaluate whether the personal narratives operate as political testimony to challenge government accounts of welfare reform and dominant stereotypes of benefits claimants, and second to assess the potential for and limits to progressive advocacy in popular journalism. The study uses content analysis of 473 articles over the course of a year in the Daily Mirror and Sunday People newspapers, and qualitative analysis of a sub-set of 113 articles to analyse the extent to which the campaign articles extrapolated from the personal to the general, and the role of ‘victim–witnesses’ in articulating their own subjectivity and political agency. The analysis indicates that both newspapers allowed affected individuals to express their own subjectivity to challenge stereotypes, but it was civil society organisations and opinion columnists who most explicitly extrapolated from the personal to the political. Collectively organised benefits claimants were rarely quoted, and there was some evidence of ventriloquisation of the editorial voice in the political criticisms of victim–witnesses. However, a campaigning columnist in the Mirror more actively empowered some of those affected to speak directly to politicians. This indicates the value of campaigning journalism when it is truly engaged in solidarity with those affected, rather than instrumentalising victim–witnesses to further the newspapers’ campaign goals.

Cities of Refuge, Rebel Cities, and the City to Come

2019 ◽  
pp. 253-271
Author(s):  
Giovanna Borradori
Keyword(s):  
Critical Reflection ◽  
Symbolic Capital ◽  
Political Agency ◽  
The Political ◽  
Shared Experience ◽  
The Core ◽  
Political Transformations ◽  
Urban Contexts ◽  
To Come ◽  
The City

As the processes of globalization transform cities into nodes of accumulation of financial and symbolic capital, it is fair to assume that urban contexts have never been more vulnerable to the systemic imperatives of the market. It is thus surprising that cities continue to be the site where the deepest social and political transformations come to the surface. What, then, preserves the city as a space of dissent? The claim of this chapter is that a critical reflection on the political agency of Northern and Southern cities has to start from asking what it means today to occupy the pavement of their streets. The argument explored here is that, in this age of molecular neoliberal encroachment and restructuring, it is a certain experience of dispossession, rather than the quest for identification and recognition, that makes the city the core of a shared experience of refuge and resistance.

Security

2020 ◽  
pp. 117-153
Author(s):  
Peter Hägel
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Sri Lanka ◽  
Hedge Fund ◽  
Political Agency ◽  
The Political ◽  
Jewish American ◽  
American Jewry ◽  
Tamil Diaspora ◽  
Diaspora Politics ◽  
The U.S

Chapter 5 analyzes two billionaires within transnational diaspora politics, whose ethnonational identity generates security concerns for communities abroad. The Jewish-American casino mogul Sheldon Adelson has been financing a free newspaper, Israel Hayom, which has become the most widely read daily in Israel, staunchly supporting Benjamin Netanyahu and the “entrenchment–expansionism” position vis-à-vis Palestine. His interventions in the Israel–Palestine conflict ran counter to the majority views of American Jewry and undermined President Obama’s foreign policy. The second case examines whether the hedge fund billionaire Raj Rajaratnam helped to fund the insurgency of the LTTE (“Tamil Tigers”) in his former home state Sri Lanka. While the case once produced spectacular headlines, upon closer inspection the political agency of Rajaratnam appears as very limited. He seems to have largely conformed to the demands put on the Tamil diaspora by the LTTE, and the U.S. government’s anti-terrorism policies restricted his options severely.

The Political Agency of Billionaires

2020 ◽  
pp. 90-116
Author(s):  
Peter Hägel
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Capital ◽  
World Politics ◽  
Political Agency ◽  
The Political ◽  
Entrepreneurial Success ◽  
Social And Cultural Capital ◽  
Material Interests ◽  
Sociopolitical Identity ◽  
International Behavior ◽  
Analytical Tools

Chapter 4 develops arguments and hypotheses about the political agency of billionaires, in terms of capacities, goals, and power. It draws upon insights from the “structure-agency” discussion and the political sociology of elites. While all billionaires control vast amounts of money, only few of them venture into world politics. A billionaire’s motivation to act transnationally may stem from material interests or a sociopolitical identity whose commitments reach across national borders. Wealth can be a highly fungible power resource, but its activation depends on what can be purchased, which is regulated by laws and norms. Entrepreneurial success in business can foster self-efficacy beliefs as well as social and cultural capital, yet whether this can be put to use in politics is contingent upon the political field that a billionaire is trying to enter. Further analysis thus needs to take the specificities of a billionaire’s international actions into account. This chapter is developing the analytical tools for the following case studies (chapter 5), which are structured around three goals that are often assumed to drive the international behavior of states: security, wealth (economy), and esteem (social entrepreneurship).

scholarly journals A happy choice: wellbeing as the goal of government

2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 126-165 ◽  
Author(s):  
PAUL FRIJTERS ◽  
ANDREW E. CLARK ◽  
CHRISTIAN KREKEL ◽  
RICHARD LAYARD
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Current Practice ◽  
Political Agency ◽  
The Political ◽  
Basic Case ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
History Of ◽  
Set Up

AbstractIn this article, we lay out the basic case for wellbeing as the goal of government. We briefly review the history of this idea, which goes back to the ancient Greeks and was the acknowledged ideal of the Enlightenment. We then discuss possible measures on which a wellbeing orientation could be based, emphasizing the importance of acknowledging the political agency of citizens and thus their own evaluations of their lives. We then turn to practicalities and consequences: how would one actually set up wellbeing-oriented decision-making and what difference should we expect from current practice? We end by discussing the current barriers to the adoption of wellbeing as the goal of government, both in terms of what we need to know more about and where the ideological barriers lie.

Cultural heritage of the Sámi in Finnish national histories 1894–2009

2019 ◽  
Vol 15 (4) ◽  
pp. 340-348
Author(s):  
Jukka Nyyssönen
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Heritage ◽  
Nation Building ◽  
Political Agency ◽  
The Political ◽  
Historical Knowledge ◽  
National History ◽  
Academic Discourses ◽  
The Way

How has Sámi cultural heritage been incorporated into the national histories of Finland? How have the national and academic discourses constrained and enabled ways of writing about the Sámi in this genre? A complete change from a hierarchizing and at worst racializing perspective to a more matter-of-fact approach is detectable quite late on, from the 1980s onwards. The Sámi have remained on the periphery of Finnish historiography, but they have become integrated into the national history, even though they still serve to illustrate Finnish nation-building in this genre. The amount of updated archaeological and historical knowledge has increased, but the approach still under-communicates the political agency of the Sámi. The inherent methodological and history-political conservativism stunts the way the Sámi are dealt with so that the Sámi histories remain mostly uncommunicated.

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